Category Archives: Business Intelligence

Microsoft has said it wants to "democratize AI" and be the Gutenberg press of the machine learning age. Now it is putting its money where its mouth is and dedicating an (unspecified) chunk of its Microsoft Ventures fund to "AI companies focused on inclusive growth and positive impact on society."

Two new AI training grounds — one from Google, the other from the non-profit OpenAI — hope to help jumpstart general AI that can quickly gain competency across a variety of tasks, from driving a car to juggling your calendar for you.

The first is Universe, from OpenAI. With just a few lines of code, you can set a given AI agent to work on almost any application.

Amazon.com Inc. introduced an image recognition service, a speech-to-text service dubbed Polly and “Lex,” which will let customers build conversational apps similar to its Alexa voice-activated platform.

Microsoft Teams offers a three primary ways to connect with third-party apps, each with its own strengths and nuances

When Microsoft Teams hits General Availability early next year, its slated to have over 150 integrations, ranging from partners like Asana, Hootsuite, and Zendesk to, of course, Microsoft's own product lines, including PowerPoint and Power BI.

But how each of those integrations will work and be presented to users will vary widely, with some appearing as chat bots right alongside other conversations and others taking over a tab that provides an interactive view right into the application that users can tweak right from within Teams.

There's a general consensus being able to analyze massive amounts of data has the potential to help launch an AI revolution across a number of industries, but a lot of questions about when and where those revolutions will occur.